Updates 4/11/12

After a bit of unproductivity, I hope I can get back into the swing of things.

Progress:

• Programming Abstractions: watched lecture 8, finished problem set 2.
• They began the topic of recursion in lecture 7, which I was surprised to see as I would have thought it would have been introduced in the first term. Lecture 8 dealt entirely with recursion and pretty much covered stuff I knew already, so I just skimmed it. There was a nifty recursive counting (nCk) algorithm they showed that was interesting, but mostly I had seen all of it. The problem set was, like the first one, pretty basic and seemed mostly geared towards just getting students used to the basics of C++, particularly the data types that they use. The last problem was a lot of busy work IMO, with a bunch of if statements. Though, perhaps there was an easier way to implement it; in Python I could have used a few try/except blocks instead of explicitly writing out all the if statements. Here is my code: http://pastebin.com/6dL3FDqW
• Algorithms: watched second video of VII, first two videos of VIII, and all but the fourth video of IX. Did problem set 2, albeit with a mistake that cost me two points.
• I ended up having a lot of things come up that cost me valuable time, so I was unable to give the problem set the time it deserved or even to watch all of the videos I wanted to. All that to come.
• Linear Algebra: watched through lecture 7.
• Thus far, I'm still finding the idea of subspaces quite understandable, and I'm finding that bit by bit my intuition for matrices is building. It's still not at the level I'd like yet, but it's encouraging. Next up is to do problem set 2, which I may or may not be behind on schedule-wise.

I've gotta run so I'll skip the to-do section. Mostly it's pretty obvious. One thing that I definitely have to do - what a chore - is GRE study. Also I need to register for the test.